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The Megalomania of the National Ideal

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The Megalomania of the National Ideal THE MEGALOMANIA OF THE NATIONAL IDEAL EDVARD BENEŠ AND THE ORIGINS OF THE POSTWAR EXPULSION OF THE SUDETEN GERMANS, 1918–1945 Timothy R. Wright ~ A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in History University of Sydney SID: 310243866 October 2013 ABSTRACT The expulsion of the German populations of Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War was among the largest and most brutal forced migrations in human history. It is also one of the least understood. By focusing on the exile of one group, the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia, this thesis seeks to discover why the postwar eviction took place. It traces the origins of the purge from the foundation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, and argues that the Republic’s long-serving president, Edvard Beneš, played a crucial role in the development and implementation of the plan. Through a detailed analysis of interwar minority rights, population transfers and the notion of German collective guilt, this thesis takes the position that the motivations behind postwar expulsions were shaped by the bitter experiences of the interwar period and that they were not, therefore, carried out as an impulsive act of retribution in the hour of victory. i CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS iii LIST OF MAPS AND TABLES iv INTRODUCTION 1 I TWILIGHT OF INTERNATIONALISM 13 National self-determination and minority rights in the First Czechoslovak Republic II FROM MUNICH TO POTSDAM 44 The path to expulsion in East-Central Europe III SAFEGUARDING DEMOCRACY 72 Collective guilt and the foundations of the postwar order CONCLUSION 93 BIBLIOGRAPHY 96 ii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 1.1. President Beneš of Czechoslovakia 12 1.2. Konrad Henlein and Adolf Hitler, 1938 43 iii LIST OF MAPS AND TABLES Maps 1.1. Ethnographic map of Czechoslovakia showing minorities 29 1.2. Ethnographic map of Czechoslovakia showing density of the German minority 30 Tables 2.1. Expulsion proposals presented by President Beneš to the Allied Powers 70 2.2. Number of Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, 1945–1946 71 3.1. Czechoslovak Parliamentary Elections, 19 May 1935 91 3.2. Czechoslovak Parliamentary Elections, 26 May 1946 92 iv INTRODUCTION ~ Expelled from their homes in the Sudetenland, East Prussia and the whole vast region of Germany taken over by the Poles ... a horde of Germans is struggling daily into Berlin – and being turned away because there is no food for them. The majority are old men, women and children. Some of these persons, too weak to wander further, have been seen under the bomb-wrecked roof of the Stettiner railway station dead or dying ... the figure of those [throughout Germany] for whom no food can be provided rises to 13,000,000 at least. This proportion of Germany’s population must die before winter if nothing is done. ─ Victor Gollancz1 In the immediate years following the defeat of Germany, an ugly spectacle confronted Europe that was equal to all but the most barbaric acts of the Nazi regime. Despite the fact that the Second World War had been fought upon the principles of democracy and freedom, in the first years of peace that followed victory an event of unprecedented scale and suffering took place in the heart of the European continent. In an apparent act of retribution, twelve to fourteen million Germans were evicted from their ancestral homes in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary and forced into the American, British and Soviet occupation zones of postwar Germany. 2 1 Victor Gollancz, et al., ‘Save Europe Now: To the Editor, the Journal-Herald’, North Devon Journal, 13 September 1945, p. 4. 2 There is no exact figure for the total number of Germans expelled during the ‘wild expulsions’ (1944–45) and the ‘organised expulsions’ (1946–47) due to a lack of population data during the Second World War. Alfred M. de Zayas places the total number of expellees at fifteen million using figures obtained from the German Federal Ministry of Expellees. More conservative estimates range between twelve and fourteen million. See Alfred M. 1 These expulsions, which had been approved in July 1945 by the Allied Powers at the Potsdam Conference, must surely rank among the greatest atrocities committed by humanity during the course of the twentieth-century. The overwhelming majority of expellees were women and children; the smallest group affected were adult males – the demographic most likely to have consorted with the Nazi regime.3 Contrary to the terms of the Potsdam Protocol, which sanctioned the ‘orderly and humane’ transfer of German populations, the expulsions were carried out with great brutality and vengeance. More than two million Germans did not survive this exercise in ethnic cleansing and many hundreds of thousands perished from starvation, malnutrition, disease and exposure as they made their westward transit in cattle trucks and freight trains to war-torn Germany.4 THE EXPULSIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY EUROPE All too often, the history of twentieth-century Europe has been reduced to a battle between moral antitheses, and this tendency has for too long conditioned general perceptions of the postwar expulsion of the Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. According to conventional wisdom, the expulsion of German minorities was a just punishment for their de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans – Background, Execution, and Consequences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. xix, xxi, xxv; R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 1; Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 111; G. C. Paikert, The German Exodus: A selective study on the post-World War II expulsion of German populations and its effects (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 2, footnote 2; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 25-26. For estimates of the number of Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, see Piotr Pykel, ‘The Expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia’, in Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees, eds., The Expulsion of the ‘German’ Communities from Eastern Europe at the End of the Second World War, EUI Working Paper, HEC No. 2004/1 (Florence: European Universities Institute, 2004), pp. 18-20; Zdeněk Radvanovský, ‘The Transfer of Czechoslovakia’s Germans and its Impact in the Border Region after the Second World War’, in Mark Cornwall and R. J. W. Evans, eds., Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe 1918 – 1948 (New York: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007), pp. 224-225. 3 Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 229-253. 4 There is also considerable ambiguity over the number of Germans who died during the expulsions. Estimates typically range from 500,000 to 2,000,000. See Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. xxv; Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 1. 2 collusion with Nazi Germany as irredentist ‘fifth columns’.5 A far more robust analysis casts doubt upon such an assumption and indicates that the motivations behind the purge of German minorities and the machinery by which this project was achieved form part of a broader historical narrative whose penultimate chapter is the period between 1939 and 1945. The postwar expulsion of the Germans was a poignant example of the brutality and misery that characterised the first-half of the twentieth-century. This period has been labelled ‘the era of violence’ by Ian Kershaw due to the exposure of civilian populations to the effects of total war and the increased capacity of the state to implement its political and racial ideologies.6 Although such violence was not endemic to Europe, some of its worst examples occurred on the continent between 1914 and 1945. As Tony Judt remarked, the vantage point of the end of the Second World War left ‘little of which to be proud and much about to feel embarrassed and more than a little guilty’.7 The expulsion of the Germans was a manifestation of this violent era that, in many regards, did not distinguish between the dictatorships and democracies. Both were the practitioners of state violence, whether on the subaltern periphery or within Europe itself. A second broader trend to which the expulsions form part was the rise of nationalism and the process of nation-state formation in East-Central Europe.8 After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, the intermingled ethnic boundaries of their former territories did not provide demographic foundations that gave way to naturally forming nation-states. In 1918–1919, the borders drawn and states created at the Paris Peace 5 De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 4. 6 Ian Kershaw, ‘War and Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe’, Contemporary European History, Vol. 14, Issue 1 (February 2005), p. 108. 7 Judt, Postwar, p. 41. 8 Matthew Frank, ‘Reconstructing the Nation-State: Population Transfers in Central and Eastern Europe, 1944– 48’, in Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White, eds., The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, 1944–49 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 27-47. 3 Conference were as much arbitrary as they were principled.9 The failure to implement President Wilson’s call for self-determination for all nationalities not only sealed the fate of the Versailles settlement, but further exacerbated ethnic tensions by making the nation the key unit of political organisation. This was evident in the political structure of ‘nation-states’ such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, whose borders extended far beyond the core national groups they represented and thus brought within their jurisdiction German, Hungarian and Ukrainian minorities.10 As such, the chaotic emergence nation-states in East-Central Europe followed the earlier example set in the Balkans.
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